David Bollier

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund has been doing pioneering work for many years in trying to protect the rights of communities against corporate enclosures, especially in its home state of Pennsylvania.  This work is impressive for trying to blend civil disobedience and law at the municipal level:  a bold, creative strategy to forge new legal standards to protect the environment and the rights of communities.

The executive director of CELDF, Thomas Alan Linzey, recently published a powerful piece about a landmark ruling by a Pennsylvania judge holding that corporations are not “persons” under the state constitution. The litigation revolved around a claim by Range Resources, a gas extraction corporation, that it has a constitutional right to privacy under the Pennsylvania Constitution.  The corporation had tried to prevent the public release of a sealed settlement agreement between it and a family in western Pennsylvania that said its water had been contaminated by fracking. 

But Judge Debbie O’Dell-Seneca of the Washington Court of Common Pleas denied the request, saying that “in the absence of state law, business entities are nothing.”  If corporations can claim independent rights, she held, then “the chattel would become the co-equal to its owners, the servant on par with its masters, the agent the peer of its principals, and the legal fabrication superior to the law that created and sustains it.”  It turns out that Range Resources and other corporations had paid out $750,000 to settle claims of water contamination caused by fracking.

If there is one good outcome from the wreckage of the Google’s effort to digitize the world’s books, it is the push that it gave to librarians like Robert Darnton to find a better way.  Google had wanted to build a search service for an enormous number of books, and it went to the trouble of digitizing more than 30 millions of them into a vast database. 

The only problem is that the whole enterprise was something of a betrayal of the public domain.  The world’s leading university research libraries were providing millions of books for free to Google, which was then planning to sell search subscriptions to these libraries to access the very same books via the Internet. Google also planned to sell the books at whatever prices it wished to set. One can easily imagine a new giant monopoly with a hammerlock on the digitized knowledge of the past century and beyond.

A number of parties, including Robert Darnton, the University Librarian at Harvard, opposed the Google Books project for locking up knowledge on terms set by Google, rather than allowing it to flow freely, without restriction, as is customary in scholarly commons.  The Google digital library project was essentially scuttled in March 2011 when a federal court struck down a settlement that had been negotiated among authors, publishers, Google and others.  The court held that it contained too many unlawful, unacceptable provisions. 

The good news is that some of the leading research universities in the US have risen to the challenge of creating a better, more accessible knowledge commons.  On April 18, the Digital Public Library of America will be launched as a way to make the holdings of US libraries, museums and archives freely accessible to anyone via the Internet.  The project represents a grand coalition of collaboration among leading university libraries, foundations and scholars.  DPLA describes itself as “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that would draw on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives and museums in order to educate, inform and empower everyone in the current and future generations.”  Darnton explains the planning, rationale and future of the DPLA in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. 

What does it mean to live without money?  Is it possible?  And how does it change one’s outlook on life and human relationships?  I stumbled across a wonderful book, The Man Who Quit Money (Riverhead Books, 2012), the story of Daniel Suelo, who, in the style of Henry David Thoreau, decided to live deliberately, and with clear purpose, by giving up money.  I’m a bit of a late-comer to Suelo’s story, which captured a lot of attention in late 2009 following a profile in Details magazine.

Suelo made the radical decision that he would not earn, receive or spend any money – his attempt to live life more directly and honestly.  In the book, journalist Mark Sundeen’s describes the journey that Suelo has taken over the past ten years in leading an active, productive, socially satisfying life without markets.  Just as anthropologists have often searched for the “savage child” raised by animals rather than humans (in order to assess the role of nurture vs. nature), Suelo, now 52, is that rare real-life example of what it means to live voluntarily outside of the market order without becoming a recluse.  Here is a real human being, not an abstraction, who does not want to be an employee, consumer or investor.

For shelter, Suelo has lived in a dozen of more caves in the canyons near Arches National Park, near Moab, Utah.  He forages for food from the desert – cactus pods, yucca seeds, wildflower and the like – and engages in dumpster-diving for food and clothing.  Born Daniel Shellabarger, he took the name “Suelo,” Spanish for “soil,” and decided to have the smallest possible ecological footprint as possible.

To outside appearances, Suelo could easily be seen as yet another homeless or mentally ill person without friends or family.  But despite maintaining a minimalist household comprised of discarded items, Suelo is no monastic or hermit.  He has many friends in town.  He sometimes house-sits and accepts meals from friends.  He volunteers for various community projects.  He wanders the Utah desert and meditates.  While his life is fairly impoverished by conventional standards, Suelo considers it a happy existence. 

Naturally, the reader wants to know how and why a person would choose to live this way.  Some explanations arise from the Christian fundamentalist upbringing that Suelo fled, before discovering that he was gay as well.  It would be easy to stereotype this story as one about a man on the run from himself.  But as the author Mark Sundeen makes clear, Suelo is brutally honest about himself and his search for authenticity – which is why this book raises some fascinating issues about what it means to live without money. 

It is the lazy conceit of the political class that “representative democracy” is the most reliable way of carrying out the public will.  Just as George W. Bush showed how the accountability mechanisms of state power are often more notional than real, the government of Iceland has now exposed its disdain for public opinion on matters of democratic empowerment.  A recent blog post by Thorvaldur Gylfason gets right to the point:  “Putsch:  Iceland’s crowd-sourced constitution killed by parliament.”  Gylfason is an economics professor blogging at the German blog Verfassungsblog (“on matters constitutional”).  

Iceland’s constitutional drama got its start following the 2008 crash.  As viewers of the film Inside Job will recall, the financial collapse was devastating to Iceland, which had set itself up as an offshore financial center.  After citizen protesters banged pots and pans in the street, demanding a new government, a new post-crash government eventually chose 950 random citizens to give their thoughts on a new constitution.  An elected constitutional council used social media to solicit the views of the public.

This open, thoughtful process was later invalidated by the country’s Supreme Court, which was dominated by justices belonging to the discredited political party responsible for the financial crash.  In response, the Icelandic parliament established a new constitutional council to draft a constitution.  That four-month process in 2011 yielded some remarkable reform proposals, as Gylfason writes: 

The constitutional bill stipulates, among other things: (a) electoral reform securing ‘one person, one vote’; (b) national ownership of natural resources; (c) direct democracy through national referenda; (d) freedom of information; and (e) environmental protection plus a number of new provisions designed to superimpose a layer of checks and balances on the existing system of semi-presidential parliamentary form of government. The preamble sets the tone: “We, the people of Iceland, wish to create a just society where everyone has a seat at the same table.” The people were invited to contribute to the drafting through the Constitutional Council’s interactive website. Foreign experts on constitutions, e.g. Prof. Jon Elster of Columbia University and Prof. Tom Ginsburg of the University of Chicago, have publicly praised the bill and the democratic way in which it was drafted.